Maker Faire Rome Premiere: presenting Open Wheels

Those that will be so lucky to be with us at the Rome Maker Faire later this week, will be able to put their maker hands on our very acclaimed (even if never really internationally showcased) … Open Wheels.

The Open Wheels is a prototype for an open source clone / replacement of the very well know Segway.

Designing the Open Wheels have been quite hard since it implied a lot of mechanics but recently we have been able to publish it on our Italian Magazine Elettronica In and we received a lot of interest.

The Open Wheels will be therefore disclosed to the international public for the first time and everyone will be able to take a ride.

As you can see from the following picture with Boris riding the beast, the Open Wheeler is fully working.

The plan, after the maker faire is to start open sourcing the machine and maybe start working on a packetization as a kit to be distributed.

As you know from our previous history, for example with 3Drag, we like to opensource thing in the right way and we put a lot of efforts in documentation and releasing all the files with no strings attached. Here’s in this post you can find the story of how we opensourced the 3Drag (that by the way now has it’s own page here).

We are wrangling with many ideas, maybe evena a pre-order/crowdfunding campaign could help help us raise the much needed budget to industrialize a little bit the thing. Whould you be interested to participate to such a campaign. If yes contact us or just share a comment on the blog.

As you may understand when dealing with such an important topic as mobility we just need to put a little more effort in identifying potentially problematic things that may cause harm to people.

The topic of personal mobility is an interesting one to be approached from the open source point of view, it relates with sustainability and cities, it’s an important topic as the interest around open source cars (such as wikispeed or the elusive OS Vehicle that will be presented as well at Rome Maker Faire) shows.